I recently completed the Bachelor of Science in Information Technology program at Purdue University Global and wanted to give my review and insights. In the end, I finished the program within 2 terms (5 months) with a 4.0 GPA. Hopefully this can be of help to anyone in the future considering taking this or other programs at Purdue. I'll try to help describe what the program is so you can determine if it is right for you. I'll show what I did to maximize transfer credits before entering the program. I'll give some thoughts on the program, enrollment, advisors, professors, courses, assignments, and some advice on how to progress quickly.
Description
You can find more information about actual program here. I specifically took the ExcelTrack program which is different from their standard online degree program. The standard program is a fixed number of courses per term and a fixed cost per credit. The ExcelTrack is an open schedule where the courses are split into 1 credit modules and you can finish as many as you want per term. In this case you pay a fixed tuition per term with no limit to the courses you take. This means, if you have the time to dedicate, you can save money and finish your degree faster. The things you will spend most of the time doing in the courses is 1) reading/researching 2) writing papers 3) creating slideshows 4) taking quizzes 5) making diagrams, recording talks, doing labs. Basically in that order of most time to least time spent. You will be writing a lot. Most of the papers will be about explaining technical topics or coming up with solutions for hypothetical business problems. I think the two main considerations for taking this program is that you are comfortable reading about technical topics, eg, project management, operating systems, networking, software, and hardware. And that you are comfortable with writing papers and making slideshow presentations.
Transfer Credits
The degree program consists of 180 total credits that need to be completed. 75% of credit can be transfer credit which comes out to 135 possible credits, of which I acquired 134 credits over about a one year period before entering Purdue. I will leave a link to my degree plan that I followed for all my credits. I did 85 of my transfer credits with a combination of Sophia and Study.com which many of the great people here have provided guides for. I did another 49 transfer credits with certificates (Purdue gives transfer credit for accepted technical certification). If you have any on the list then you can submit it for credit. If not, the two I used are relatively fast and cheap to acquire.
1. Google IT Support Professional Certificate
This certificate can be used for 15 transfer credits at Purdue. It is available on Coursera and consists of 5 courses split into 5-6 unit weeks each. The material is mainly instructional videos taught by Google employees. There are multiple-choice quizzes and labs which need to be completed at the end of each unit, you need above 80% on the quizzes to pass. Coursera offers a 1 week free trial and then its $40/mo after that. It is possible to finish the courses in 1 week, but you'll likely need an entire week free to do it, which is what I did. Familiarity with IT topics will help, some of the material is difficult. Here is my strategy for finishing quickly. First watch all the videos in 1.25x speed and skip all of the "interview" videos, you only need the content video information. Each video includes a transcript which you should copy to another document, this will serve as your notes to refer to for the quizzes. The labs are all straightforward if you follow the instructions.
2. PHP Certificate
This certificate can be used for 34 transfer credits at Purdue. The material is the freely available PHP tutorial on W3Schools consisting of readings, example code, and code practice, but the examination is $95. It consists of 70 multiple-choice questions (70%+ to pass, 3 attempts). The time to finish will vary. I have experience with software and took about 4 days to go through material and take notes, before attempting the exam. For the exam you can have the PHP Tutorial up to use as notes.
Continue part 2 in reply..
Purdue
1. Enrollment
When you have about 90-100 transfer credits that would be a good point to enroll. You'll want to do this least 2 months before the next start date. You can continue to submit transfer credits during the program as long as you haven't started the corresponding course yet. But I would recommend getting all your transfer credits in beforehand so you can focus on Purdue courses during the program. The 2 main requirements that need to be fulfilled for enrolling is 3 college-level courses and 3 years of related work experience. The 3 courses can be from Sophia/Study.com if you haven't done college before. For the work experience, I didn't have to submit a record of employment, so as long as you are comfortable with computers and tech you can probably just put in something as experience. When you are accepted there will be an orientation course to complete before you start your regular courses, its straightforward, writing about goals, study strategy, etc. There is also financial aid options available so that is something you can discuss with your advisor during enrollment.
2. Advisors/Professors
If you fill out the "Request Information" on degree information page, you will be contact by an enrollment advisor that helps guide you through enrollment, submitting required docs, transfer credits, and financial aid options. Experience may vary, but my advisor was helpful, replied promptly (1-2 days), cleared up most of my questions. I interacted with this advisor a lot, questions about the program and constantly sending in transfer credit submissions. Once you are enrolled you will get a different student advisor. They were also helpful and replied promptly, though I didn't interact with them too much. I was pretty good at finding info navigating the Purdue student portal or I would contact professors directly about course or assignment questions. Once you get an idea of how each course module works, the assessment assignments are detailed enough to provide all the instructions needed to complete them. So besides the feedback from my completed assignments, I only contacted professors a few times to ask some questions. For the Capstone (a term to work on a final project) because it's structured like a standard class, there is a weekly videochat seminar with the professor and more interaction. My professor for the capstone walked through each weeks unit assignments and was really good about answering questions about the final projects. I would say my experience with the Purdue faculty wasn't particularly extensive, but overall positive.
3. Courses
The courses for the ExcelTrack program are split into 1-credit modules. A 100/200 level course has 5 modules, while a 300/400 level has 6 modules. When you receive a grade for the assessment assignment for that module, the next module becomes available. The student advisor starts you off with 2 courses. The course material usually consists of one or two books that cover technical topics, all available as pdfs in the digital school library. The content of the books are used as research for the module assignment. This is usually writing a paper or making a slideshow presentation. If there is a quiz, it will have its own material to study. It usually takes the professors as fast as one day or as slow as 3 days to grade assignments (in my experience at least). So if you get to a point where you are waiting on your all your assignments to be graded, you'll have to contact the student advisor to open up more for you. Do this in advance so you don't waste any days where you could be working on more assignments. I finished 30 credits my first term and 16 credits (which includes the Capstone) in the second term.
4. Strategy
I'll detail how I went about completing the modules. Not that it is the best or only way, just what I found worked well for me. For each module, skip to the assignment section. Read the instructions, the requirements, and download the grading rubric and read the requirements for a mastery grade. That basically forms what you'll be working on for that module. For any papers, presentations, diagrams, etc, read the sections of the resource book(s) related to the assignment. If you need additional resources, you can search the school digital library, or search the web. Take enough notes and cite a few key quotations to use in the paper. You don't need to read more than whats needed to write the paper. If there is no word count requirement stated, writing around ~350 words on a topic is usually enough. For most topics you don't need to write in-depth. Enough information to explain the topic to a semi-novice is usually sufficient. I also ran my papers through Grammarly, an online site that does spell checking, grammar correction, and rephrasing suggestions, before submitting assignments. For the quizzes, they will be multiple choice and you'll submit screenshots of the result screen. There is no limit to the number of attempts, so you can keep retaking until you pass. After taking a quiz you'll see the correct answers which can be memorized before retaking. The Capstone must be taken at the start of a term and takes the full 10 weeks, which means the earliest you can take it is in your second term. There will be weekly unit assignments along with working on your final project. The assignments are all related to project management and submitting updates on your project status. Some of the capstone project choices include: build a website, design a database, write a network security policy, or write a project management plan, along with a few others. You can use material from your courses, but otherwise, the research and resources are up to you for the final project.
Final Thoughts
As I said before, prepare to do a lot of writing. I can't say I like writing very much, but I'm at least comfortable with doing it and I have previous knowledge in IT and software programming which helped. I definitely recommend looking at some of the guides by the users here for strategy with Sophia and Study.com. The certificates also really helped with reaching the transfer credit limit. The PHP certificate, in particular, is very good value. The course module assignments do vary in difficulty, some could be done in a day, others could take 3-4+. I don't particularly like doing schoolwork, so the struggle was real at times. Overall I'd say the course structure, resources, and assignments were all well presented and straightforward to understand and complete. I also had a positive experience with all of the advisors and professors so there were no complaints there. There is probably something important I missed, so I'm open to answer any questions people might have.
Description
You can find more information about actual program here. I specifically took the ExcelTrack program which is different from their standard online degree program. The standard program is a fixed number of courses per term and a fixed cost per credit. The ExcelTrack is an open schedule where the courses are split into 1 credit modules and you can finish as many as you want per term. In this case you pay a fixed tuition per term with no limit to the courses you take. This means, if you have the time to dedicate, you can save money and finish your degree faster. The things you will spend most of the time doing in the courses is 1) reading/researching 2) writing papers 3) creating slideshows 4) taking quizzes 5) making diagrams, recording talks, doing labs. Basically in that order of most time to least time spent. You will be writing a lot. Most of the papers will be about explaining technical topics or coming up with solutions for hypothetical business problems. I think the two main considerations for taking this program is that you are comfortable reading about technical topics, eg, project management, operating systems, networking, software, and hardware. And that you are comfortable with writing papers and making slideshow presentations.
Transfer Credits
The degree program consists of 180 total credits that need to be completed. 75% of credit can be transfer credit which comes out to 135 possible credits, of which I acquired 134 credits over about a one year period before entering Purdue. I will leave a link to my degree plan that I followed for all my credits. I did 85 of my transfer credits with a combination of Sophia and Study.com which many of the great people here have provided guides for. I did another 49 transfer credits with certificates (Purdue gives transfer credit for accepted technical certification). If you have any on the list then you can submit it for credit. If not, the two I used are relatively fast and cheap to acquire.
1. Google IT Support Professional Certificate
This certificate can be used for 15 transfer credits at Purdue. It is available on Coursera and consists of 5 courses split into 5-6 unit weeks each. The material is mainly instructional videos taught by Google employees. There are multiple-choice quizzes and labs which need to be completed at the end of each unit, you need above 80% on the quizzes to pass. Coursera offers a 1 week free trial and then its $40/mo after that. It is possible to finish the courses in 1 week, but you'll likely need an entire week free to do it, which is what I did. Familiarity with IT topics will help, some of the material is difficult. Here is my strategy for finishing quickly. First watch all the videos in 1.25x speed and skip all of the "interview" videos, you only need the content video information. Each video includes a transcript which you should copy to another document, this will serve as your notes to refer to for the quizzes. The labs are all straightforward if you follow the instructions.
2. PHP Certificate
This certificate can be used for 34 transfer credits at Purdue. The material is the freely available PHP tutorial on W3Schools consisting of readings, example code, and code practice, but the examination is $95. It consists of 70 multiple-choice questions (70%+ to pass, 3 attempts). The time to finish will vary. I have experience with software and took about 4 days to go through material and take notes, before attempting the exam. For the exam you can have the PHP Tutorial up to use as notes.
Continue part 2 in reply..
Purdue
1. Enrollment
When you have about 90-100 transfer credits that would be a good point to enroll. You'll want to do this least 2 months before the next start date. You can continue to submit transfer credits during the program as long as you haven't started the corresponding course yet. But I would recommend getting all your transfer credits in beforehand so you can focus on Purdue courses during the program. The 2 main requirements that need to be fulfilled for enrolling is 3 college-level courses and 3 years of related work experience. The 3 courses can be from Sophia/Study.com if you haven't done college before. For the work experience, I didn't have to submit a record of employment, so as long as you are comfortable with computers and tech you can probably just put in something as experience. When you are accepted there will be an orientation course to complete before you start your regular courses, its straightforward, writing about goals, study strategy, etc. There is also financial aid options available so that is something you can discuss with your advisor during enrollment.
2. Advisors/Professors
If you fill out the "Request Information" on degree information page, you will be contact by an enrollment advisor that helps guide you through enrollment, submitting required docs, transfer credits, and financial aid options. Experience may vary, but my advisor was helpful, replied promptly (1-2 days), cleared up most of my questions. I interacted with this advisor a lot, questions about the program and constantly sending in transfer credit submissions. Once you are enrolled you will get a different student advisor. They were also helpful and replied promptly, though I didn't interact with them too much. I was pretty good at finding info navigating the Purdue student portal or I would contact professors directly about course or assignment questions. Once you get an idea of how each course module works, the assessment assignments are detailed enough to provide all the instructions needed to complete them. So besides the feedback from my completed assignments, I only contacted professors a few times to ask some questions. For the Capstone (a term to work on a final project) because it's structured like a standard class, there is a weekly videochat seminar with the professor and more interaction. My professor for the capstone walked through each weeks unit assignments and was really good about answering questions about the final projects. I would say my experience with the Purdue faculty wasn't particularly extensive, but overall positive.
3. Courses
The courses for the ExcelTrack program are split into 1-credit modules. A 100/200 level course has 5 modules, while a 300/400 level has 6 modules. When you receive a grade for the assessment assignment for that module, the next module becomes available. The student advisor starts you off with 2 courses. The course material usually consists of one or two books that cover technical topics, all available as pdfs in the digital school library. The content of the books are used as research for the module assignment. This is usually writing a paper or making a slideshow presentation. If there is a quiz, it will have its own material to study. It usually takes the professors as fast as one day or as slow as 3 days to grade assignments (in my experience at least). So if you get to a point where you are waiting on your all your assignments to be graded, you'll have to contact the student advisor to open up more for you. Do this in advance so you don't waste any days where you could be working on more assignments. I finished 30 credits my first term and 16 credits (which includes the Capstone) in the second term.
4. Strategy
I'll detail how I went about completing the modules. Not that it is the best or only way, just what I found worked well for me. For each module, skip to the assignment section. Read the instructions, the requirements, and download the grading rubric and read the requirements for a mastery grade. That basically forms what you'll be working on for that module. For any papers, presentations, diagrams, etc, read the sections of the resource book(s) related to the assignment. If you need additional resources, you can search the school digital library, or search the web. Take enough notes and cite a few key quotations to use in the paper. You don't need to read more than whats needed to write the paper. If there is no word count requirement stated, writing around ~350 words on a topic is usually enough. For most topics you don't need to write in-depth. Enough information to explain the topic to a semi-novice is usually sufficient. I also ran my papers through Grammarly, an online site that does spell checking, grammar correction, and rephrasing suggestions, before submitting assignments. For the quizzes, they will be multiple choice and you'll submit screenshots of the result screen. There is no limit to the number of attempts, so you can keep retaking until you pass. After taking a quiz you'll see the correct answers which can be memorized before retaking. The Capstone must be taken at the start of a term and takes the full 10 weeks, which means the earliest you can take it is in your second term. There will be weekly unit assignments along with working on your final project. The assignments are all related to project management and submitting updates on your project status. Some of the capstone project choices include: build a website, design a database, write a network security policy, or write a project management plan, along with a few others. You can use material from your courses, but otherwise, the research and resources are up to you for the final project.
Final Thoughts
As I said before, prepare to do a lot of writing. I can't say I like writing very much, but I'm at least comfortable with doing it and I have previous knowledge in IT and software programming which helped. I definitely recommend looking at some of the guides by the users here for strategy with Sophia and Study.com. The certificates also really helped with reaching the transfer credit limit. The PHP certificate, in particular, is very good value. The course module assignments do vary in difficulty, some could be done in a day, others could take 3-4+. I don't particularly like doing schoolwork, so the struggle was real at times. Overall I'd say the course structure, resources, and assignments were all well presented and straightforward to understand and complete. I also had a positive experience with all of the advisors and professors so there were no complaints there. There is probably something important I missed, so I'm open to answer any questions people might have.
Purdue University Global - BA Information Technology [2022]
GeorgiaTech - MS Computer Science [~2025]
Review and degree path for Purdue Bachelor of Science in IT
GeorgiaTech - MS Computer Science [~2025]
Review and degree path for Purdue Bachelor of Science in IT
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